The first time it happened it scared the living
daylights out of me. It scared the bejeesus
out of me.

I was brushing my teeth looking in the mirror. I leaned down to
spit and rinse my brush. When I looked up again there was no
reflection
of me in the mirror - instead there was just the wall and a towel
hanging on a rack behind me. I was invisible.

It lasted for less than half a second. It seemed like an eternity.
As soon as I panicked my reflection came back.

There's nothing significant about what happened. There's nothing
significant about experiencing being invisible. It doesn't mean
anything. It's just what happened. It's an experience. The
first time was
scary.

We have all kinds of experiences in Life. Life is a
rich smorgasbord of experiences we're given to have -
many of them we'll even enjoy. It's the table of the feast laden
until it's literally groaning under the weight of the
bounty. Then we ruin it all by making it mean
something. Instead of just having experiences, instead of
simply experiencing the experiences, we disrespect Life and
all its bounty by making it mean something.

Werner
Erhard
is a master of being with whatever's going on. People ask how and where
Werner Erhard got what he's got.

It's likely he didn't get it anywhere. It's likely there's
nothing to get.
It could be said all Werner Erhard does is look into the space, then
simply says whatever it is he sees there.

It's at about this point during the conversation in my job as a
cowboy
I pick up my lasso and gallop off on my trusty
steed to rope in the calves who bolt when talk turns to "look
into the space then simply say whatever's there". Don't run! There's no
shortage of compassion here. There's no lack of caring here. Neither is
there apathy. Having things be exactly the way they
are and exactly the way they aren't is a
candidate for a veritable textbook definition of love.

As much as they love us, our
parents
didn't teach us this. School, colleges, and universities didn't teach
us this. Society won't teach us this. It's unlikely when you were going
through something you didn't like, you were coached to
"experience the experience". In all likelihood, when you
were going through something you didn't like, you were coached to fix
it, to cure it, even to ignore it. So we grew up having
learned (Man! How we've learned ...) to fix, to
cure, and even to ignore experience. Now that we're big people,
it's almost unfathomable to realize we've had it ass
backwards all along for so long. The way to deal with
experience isn't to fix it, isn't to cure it. Neither is it to ignore
it. The way to deal with experience is to experience it.

When I looked in the mirror the next time and noticed I was invisible,
this time it was actually a remarkable experience, an
extraordinary experience, one which for the life of me I
couldn't just be with without turning it into something
else, without trying to analyze it, without trying to make
it mean something. And of course, as soon as I did that, human
being that I am, the experience went away. There was no panic
this time, only a kind of awe, a kind of amazement, a kind of
delicious shock that's always there in the face of the
extraordinary.

That's why when my friend called me and said he was
"going out of his head",
what I wanted him to do, without getting overly intellectual about it,
without getting too analytical about it, without adding
significance to it and making it mean
something, was just be with it and experience it -
whatever it was.

So I said "That's sounds interesting. What's it like?". The
cowboy
has arrived with a rope. All the bolted calf can do now is be with
whatever he's being with. That's the whole idea. Making it available
for people is your true gift which, aside from getting it from
you, they're simply not going to get anywhere else.

By the end of the conversation he was profoundly moved by his
experience. The same symptoms which freaked him out at
first were now profoundly moving to him, simply in his act of being
with what was going on. As the experiencer of
his own experience, he'd started to see the possibility of
it, once he was no longer at odds with it by adding
significance and meaning to it.

Another friend called me late one night. He'd built a prosperous
international business but he'd stopped being responsible for its
financial integrity. When the crash came, it came very quickly. It
collapsed like a house of cards. It was all gone. He'd lost it all. He
was bankrupt, and there was a very real chance he'd lose his home as
well. He was sobbing. He said "I feel like I'm going to die.".

"Now that's a really interesting one" I said.
"What's that one like?".